=The Historical Position of Augustine.= The Middle Ages were inaugurated by a mind of the highest order,――Augustine.[49] If one were to select the most influential figures in the history of philosophy, Augustine might be chosen to stand with Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant. “In some respects Augustine stands nearer to us than Hegel and Schopenhauer.”[50] For the church, but no less for the period, it was a fortunate circumstance that Augustine should have lived just as antiquity was closing and the mediæval period beginning. Through him the various influences of the past were gathered up and presented in a scientific statement for the Middle Ages. “The history of piety and of dogma in the West was so thoroughly dominated by Augustine from the beginning of the fifth century to the era of the Reformation, that we must take this whole time as forming one period.”[51] In his relation to antiquity Augustine drew especially upon the fundamental teachings of St. Paul, the neo-Platonists, and the Patristics for the presentation of his own doctrine. He was familiar with a great number of the doctrines of antiquity, and was the medium of their transmission to the Middle Ages. He does not seem to have known the system of Aristotle, but the importance which he attached to the dialectic in the explanation of the Scriptures contributed a good deal to the use of the logic of Aristotle by the scholastics of the Middle Ages. He had some knowledge of the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, and the Epicureans through the writings of Cicero. But the most important philosophical influence upon Augustine was the neo-Platonic teaching of Plotinus and Porphyry. Neo-Platonism, the Pauline theology, and the Patristic are the large factors in the doctrine of Augustine. In his relation to the Middle Ages, what in brief was the position of Augustine? By means of neo-Platonism and a discriminating psychological analysis _he transformed the previous belief in God as a ♦judge into a belief in the personal relations between God and man_. That is to say, he carried out monotheism spiritually, and in doing this the influence of neo-Platonism is very strong in him. Augustine made one of the centres of his teaching the living relation of the soul to God. He took religion out of the sphere of cosmological science, where it had been placed by Origen and the Gnostics, and made it personal. Furthermore, he offered with this new ideal a plan of salvation; for Augustine made it his task to show (1) what God is, and (2) what the salvation of the soul requires. Whereas before Augustine the only dogmatic scheme had presented the place and function of _Christ_ in salvation, Augustine was interested in the place of _man_ in salvation. Thus he elaborated monotheism into spiritual monotheism and delineated the inward processes of the Christian life, _i. e._ of sin and grace. This important advance made by Augustine must be attributed to the influence of philosophy――neo-Platonism――upon him.